Cricket, war, and other fates: why Angus Taylor played the long game |
They say that nine times out of ten when you win the toss in Test cricket, you choose to bat. The other time, you think about bowling, but you still bat.
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In sport, as in politics, the link between intent and outcome is habitually overstated.
So, when things don't go as planned, there's always fate: "it was a good toss to lose".
The Liberal Party faced a coin-toss after being smashed in 2025.
Heads was Sussan Ley - Peter Dutton's incurious deputy who had been unfazed by the Queenslander's scoffing contempt for ex-Liberal voters plumping the Teal wave.
Tails was Angus Taylor, Dutton's flint-dry shadow treasurer-turned cheery convert to higher taxes and increased borrowing.
In a close party room ballot that might have gone either way, it was felt that Ley sent the clearer signal of a Liberal Party appropriately chastened.
Liberals seemed to be acknowledging the message from their own base about careening off to the right, about fanning divisions and ignoring women.
Yet for all that positive intent, it was uncanny how quickly the fatalism of cricket's dressing room rationalised a new meaning.
Perhaps that is because it was clear to Taylor and the other right wingers, that the 2025 post-election leadership race had always been a good one to lose.
To animate this point, consider the counterfactual. Imagine for a moment, that Taylor had triumphed narrowly in that first match-up. It seems plausible that the party would still have struggled under his command and that its continued decline would become his baggage rather than hers.
Right now, then, in February 2026, Ley might well be a newly installed leader explicitly tasked with charting a course back to Australia's electoral motherlode.
This, admittedly unproveable scenario, hardly relies on outlandish assumptions. For instance, it is plain from his current........